Troy Ave, whose real name is Roland Collins, in State Supreme Court in Manhattan at his arraignment on attempted murder and weapons charges.

CreditCreditLouis Lanzano for The New York Times

By Noah Remnick

June 22, 2016

Nearly one month after a shooting at the Irving Plaza concert hall in Manhattan that left one dead and several others injured, the rapper Troy Ave pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to attempted second-degree murder and four counts of criminal possession of a weapon.

Seated in a wheelchair and wearing a crisp white Versace tennis shirt, the rapper, whose real name is Roland Collins, raised a fist to the friends and family members who packed into the courtroom in State Supreme Court for the arraignment.

Mr. Collins, 33, was not charged with murder in the shooting that killed his friend Ronald McPhatter, 33, during the May 25 concert that featured the rapper T.I. at the club in Union Square. Though Mr. Collins is shown in a surveillance video firing a gun, his lawyers said he was not responsible for Mr. McPhatter’s death.

“Who fired the gun and caused the death and the injuries? We’re saying it was not Troy,” Scott E. Leemon, one of the lawyers, said outside the courtroom. “Scientific evidence will support our position that the way the bullets came into the victims could not have been done by Troy.”

The eight-second video from the concert site shows a man, identified by the police as Mr. Collins, wielding a gun as he burst through the door of a third-floor lounge at Irving Plaza as concertgoers pressed against a balcony. On the tape, the gunman enters the room, followed by two other men. He then searches for his target, fires one round, pauses, and lifts the weapon once again before moving out of the camera’s view.

In a second video, taken inside the green room and posted on the TMZ website, an altercation unfolds in which a group of men appears to be mediating a dispute when three gunshots ring out. A man is then heard telling everyone to get down, and some people comply while others race for the exits. A fourth gunshot is heard, and a woman can be heard shouting, “My leg.” A man in a white shirt can be seen lying on the floor. The lights then go dark and a fifth gunshot sounds.

When the shooting was over, Mr. McPhatter, who was also a bodyguard for Mr. Collins, was dead; three other people, including Mr. Collins, were shot; and three others were injured in the stampede of people racing away from the melee.

The charges against Mr. Collins relate only to what happened on the balcony, the prosecutors said; the episode in the green room remains under investigation. The case was adjourned to July 1, when Mr. Collins’s lawyers, Mr. Leemon and John Stella, will try to get their client released on bail. Mr. Collins was shot in both legs and requires physical therapy, Mr. Stella said.

“We honestly believe that there was a struggle on the floor, and that struggle was a struggle for a gun and that shots were fired during that struggle, and our client didn’t fire any of those shots,” Mr. Stella said of the episode in the green room.

Soon after the shooting, Mr. Collins arrived at NYU Langone Medical Center in a minivan. In the vehicle, officers recovered three firearms, including a Kel-Tec PF-9 semiautomatic pistol that ballistics tests confirmed was the sole gun used in the shooting, the police said. Mr. Collins was arrested the next day.

Robert K. Boyce, the chief of detectives for the New York Police Department, said there was no evidence that any other weapon had been used, but investigators had not ruled out the possibility that someone other than Mr. Collins had also fired the pistol.

On Wednesday, Justice Ronald A. Zweibel said that Mr. Collins faced additional weapons possession charges for the two other guns, which were included in the indictment. Justice Zweibel also agreed to the prosecution’s request that Mr. Collins undergo a cheek swab for DNA testing.

The killing set off a racially charged debate about whether rap music glorifies violence, or whether the lyrics represent a dramatized rendering of the artists’ worlds. Mayor Bill de Blasio and the police commissioner, William J. Bratton, offered clashing assessments of the underlying problem. In a radio interview, Mr. Bratton called rap artists “thugs” who celebrated violence, drugs and misogyny. Mr. de Blasio disagreed and said the nation needed to tighten its gun control laws.

In the wake of the shooting, Live Nation, the concert company that operates Irving Plaza, postponed three rap concerts that had been scheduled there for the next week, as well as three concerts at another venue in the city.

Though Mr. Collins remained mostly silent in court on Wednesday, he has made his position clear. This month, Mr. Collins released a mix tape, partially recorded over the phone from the Rikers Island jail complex, called “Free Troy Ave.” On the opening track, he professes his innocence and describes taking a gun from a man who tried to “assassinate me” and turning “the tables ’round like a G.”

“It ain’t the end of Troy Ave, not at all,” he says. “This is just the beginning.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: Rapper Pleads Not Guilty to Attempted Murder in Shooting at Manhattan Club. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe